


and the gentleness that comes

by romiosini



Category: Original Work
Genre: China, Cold War, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 07:41:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18687097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romiosini/pseuds/romiosini





	and the gentleness that comes

_“One must endure without losing tenderness.”_

\- Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

 

*

There’s a man on the terrasse, his fingers drumming nervously on the plexiglass table, his coffee unfinished.

Jiashuai stares behind his raised newspaper, the paper between them like a wall. He’s seated at his usual spot, right behind the open sliding door, on the inside. From here he can see both entrances, and there is no one at his back. The _garçon_ knows to keep it for him, on the rare days where Jiashuai is running late. The parisian metro system is a marvel, but sometimes the trains stop on the tracks at the most random moments.

There’s a man on the terrasse, just like there was a man in the lobby of the _Renaissance_ two weeks ago when Jiashuai met Mingjun for tea, just like there was a man behind him in the streets of Moscow months ago, when Jiashuai was “shopping”, wrapped in his long grey coat. He’s tall, around Jiashuai’s age, maybe a little younger. His dark hair is cut short, western, falling tidily right above his eyes. Him and Jiashuai are the two only Chinese men in this cafe. They were the two only Chinese men on Kalinin Street, too.

 

*

 

When Jiashuai dreams, he dreams of walking through Manchuria for nineteen days straight, the soles of his feet bleeding.

 

*

 

The man follows him into the _Bon Marché,_ and then out again. He’s strolling behind as Jiashuai takes a right turn where he would normally take a left, too casual, just a few steps behind—always a few steps behind. Jiashuai turns around suddenly and grabs him by the collar, slams him into the nearest brick wall, his bag of groceries falling to the ground, canned beans spilling on the cobblestone.

The stranger’s eyes go wide, Jiashuai’s forearm pressed to his chest. It’s the middle of the day, but they’re alone in this little alley. An innocent man would yell for help. This one remains dead silent.

“You’ve been following me,” Jiashuai hisses in Mandarin. “You’ve been following me for a while.”

The man’s Chinese is stilted. That’s the first surprise. The second one is how unsure he sounds. Untrained? It would make sense, considering how bad he has been at trailing Jiashuai, until now.

“I’m not—I’m not planning to—I mean no harm—”

Jiashuai’s elbow digs deeper into his collarbone, and he coughs.

“Who do you work for?”

“No one,” the man says hastily, looking increasingly worried, “I swear, I’m not spying on you.”

Jiashuai freezes. “I didn’t say anything about spying.”

The stranger shuts his eyes, tries to take a deep breath—fails. “Please just let me—explain. Let me explain.”

There’s nothing to _explain._ Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern—three times is enemy action.

What Jiashuai should do: hit this guy with his umbrella on the back of the head. Drag him back to his apartment in the _Quartier Latin._ Use his knives. Make him talk.

Instead he takes a step back. Pressure lifted from his windpipe, the man heaves.

“You have sixty seconds,” Jiashuai warns. “Don’t make me regret this.”

“I know who you are,” the stranger says, then immediately raises his hands up when Jiashuai goes to grab him again. “Wait! I’m—I’m trying to _defect._ Please. Please just hear me out.”

 

*

 

Waist deep in the Yalu river, Jiashuai remembers, in silence and in darkness, bag full of ammo heavy on his shoulders like a planet, how the quilted cotton of his military uniform had felt like hands against his skin.

 

*

 

“My name is Kevin Li,” the man tells Jiashuai, sitting across him at the small table in Jiashuai’s kitchen. There are two untouched glasses of tap water between them. “I’m a Canadian citizen.”

The dark blue passport he shows Jiashuai has an eagle on its cover. When Jiashuai cracks it open, he’s faced with a tiny rectangular picture of a slightly younger Kevin, smiling brightly at the camera. _Christopher Wu, born November 6, 1930._ Small print, stamped, signed.

“You’re CIA,” Jiashuai stares pointedly.

Kevin grimaces. “I’m an _asset,_ not an agent.” He squirms, hands twisting where they’re resting on his lap. He’s about a head taller than Jiashuai, but Jiashuai has taken on men much, much stronger and bulkier than that and won. “I went to school in the states on scholarship. Cornell.”

“Let me guess,” Jiashuai rolls his eyes. “Political Science?”

“Philosophy and Languages, actually. But, ah,” Kevin takes a sip of water, “I took this one class on Russian politics. The professor took—an interest. In me.”

“You were recruited,” Jiashuai translates.

Kevin sighs. “Approached. And then, I suppose, yeah. I suppose.”

“Is the passport fake?”

“Yeah,” Kevin says. “I mean, it’s a real passport, but I’m not a US national. I do have a job, here. As a translator. A real job.”

Jiashuai flips through the flimsy pages. The admission stamps tell a story he already partially knows. Checkpoint Charlie, multiple times. Moscow, via air, twice. Paris, Paris, London. Some of the dates are more familiar than others.

“You’ve been watching me for a while, Kevin Li.”

Kevin’s cheeks color slightly. High in his cheekbones, light pink. It’s a pretty flush. “I needed—to know. I needed to find someone that wouldn’t shoot me on the spot.” He finishes his water. “In Moscow, I think, that’s when I became sure.”

He had wanted to be found, then. At the cafe. At least since Kalinin Street, even if only unconsciously.

Jiashuai raises an eyebrow. “Why should I believe you?”

“I mean,” Kevin says, “I guess there is no definitive answer. But I’ve caught you red-handed during at least two dead drops. And you haven’t been arrested yet, have you?”

“I’m a spy,” Jiashuai says. “I’ve long-conned people before. I know how this works. What you’re telling me, it’s worth nothing.”

Kevin smiles a half-smile. “Doesn’t this count as a confession?”

“Maybe,” Jiashuai smirks. He likes the man’s voice. It’s deep, warm. With less fear in it, maybe, it would be beautiful. “But I’m probably going to kill you, so. It doesn’t really matter.”

 _That_ seems to remind Kevin of where he is, what he’s doing. His lips press into a thin line.

Outside, someone honks loudly. When pigeons fly in this city, Jiashuai has discovered, the flutter of their wings is loud enough to be hear inside. He’s never been a huge fan of birds.

“I want to go home,” Kevin says after a beat of silence. “That’s all I have. You should believe me because I’m tired of running, and I’m tired of hiding, and I want to go home.”

 

*

 

In Onjong, Jiashuai slept on the floor for seven days, housed by a local, like the rest of the PVA footsoldiers. Park Byungjun was—smiles, and gentleness, and two warm meals per day, and broken Mandarin, and _smiles._ Sparkling eyes, and hard work, and hope in misery.

On the sixth day, Byungjun left his bedroom door open. At night, the hardwood creaked under Jiashuai’s socked feet, the only sound.

 _In Onjong,_ Jiashuai always tells the story like this, _I slept on that boy’s floor for a week, and then we moved on South-East, and I never saw him again._

It is the truth, and it isn’t.

 

*

 

“So you were born in Vancouver,” Jiashuai says.

Kevin nods. “My mother left China when she was pregnant with me. She won’t tell me why or how. I think she was fleeing… a man. Or her own family. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

The story he paints for Jiashuai sounds real, concrete. He can see her, Mrs Li, with her hands calloused from scrubbing toilets and her forever-accented English. He can see her in the eyes of her son, in this sort of wistful rage that transpire from Kevin’s every pore, even if Jiashuai knows virtually nothing about him. Jiashuai has been hungry too, stomach twirling on itself, in the mountains, age 16. Jiashuai has been hungry too, rifle heavy in his hands, blood that wasn’t his on his clothes like camo paint.

Kevin can speak English, French, Mandarin, and Russian. The more he talks, the more Jiashuai understands—what made the plant at Cornell bet on him, what probably made him bypass the clear, almost debilitating anxiety coming off in ripples from Kevin’s body, like radio waves. He’s quick-witted, and he’s driven. He tells Jiashuai about anti-miscegenation laws and his voice cracks like fissured glass under the wind. His mother, he says, there’s a man back in British Columbia, that would marry her, if he could. But he can’t, and Kevin is in Paris, and she’s alone in their tiny apartment back in the center of Vancouver. His right hand balls into a fist. In the trembling of that fist Jiashuai recognizes a particular anger he’s maybe too familiar with.

“So you’ve read Lenin,” Jiashuai says.

“I’ve read Lenin,” Kevin confirms. “In college. Then I read Marx. Then I read Mao.”

“Well,” Jiashuai chuckles, “If you’ve read the Chairman.”  
“It wasn’t the books, though,” Kevin says. “No one sleeps in the streets, in East Germany. In New York City, old men die of frostbite in front of department stores. In Moscow working people go to the Opera.” He looks away, looks down. “No one’s ever called me a chink in Russia.”

And Jiashuai lets his mind travel home, travel years back. Sitting on his grandfather’s knee, and hearing about the droughts, and the April 12 Incident—how Jiang Jieshi’s troops had walked into Changsha after the first purge in Shanghai, like mythological monsters straight out of children’s nightmares. Comrades lined up against a wall, their last sight the muzzle of a gun.

_Life is always hard, son. But life used to be harder._

 

*

 

Lieutenant Colonel Kim Junmyeon of the KPAGF speaks perfect Mandarin, imperfect Cantonese, and only ever smiles when he’s out of uniform.

He saves Jiashuai’s life in Unsan, carries him across raining fire one arm around Jiashuai’s waist, his other hand on his pistol, shooting his way through the battlefield like Achilles in Troy, unyielding and terrible.

Jiashuai returns the favor in Hungnam, cuts the sleeve of his shirt and ties it around Junmyeon’s bleeding leg, and delirious with pain, Junmyeon tells him he loves him.

Near Jangjin Lake, a grenade goes off by mistake and kills three of their men. Junmyeon cries in his tent that night, looking simultaneously ten years younger and ten years older than he really is. Jiashuai kneels in front of him and takes his hand, kisses his bruised knuckles, eyes never leaving Junmyeon’s.

Love does not bring the dead back. Jiashuai learns that the hard way every time.

 

*

 

“I have information,” Kevin offers. “Johnny Yong, correspondent for the Xinhua News Agency in France. That’s who you’re supposed to be, right? But you’re Captain Yong Jiashuai of the MSS, from Changsha, Hunan. Highly decorated Korean War veteran, and before that, guerilla fighter, against the Kuomintang.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Jiashuai says, unimpressed.

“I can give you names. The man who told me all this about you, the man who told _him._ I have names.”

Jiashuai stills.

Outside the sun is slowly setting. The sky is pink, turning purple.

“Get up,” he says suddenly, pushing himself off his own chair too. Kevin’s expression turns to confusion. “It’s getting late. You’re going to help me make stir fry.” He squats in front of his refrigerator, picks up his last piece of fresh ginger and a few carrots, places them on on the kitchen counter. “Then I’m going to call my handler.” Kevin’s gaze, when their eyes meet, is agitated like the Atlantic Ocean. “And we’ll figure out what we’re going to do with you.”

 

*

 

In Jipyeong, Jiashuai watches, helpless, as an American officer forces Junmyeon to his knees and shoots him in the head.

Every night after that, Jiashuai watches, helpless, as an American officer forces Junmyeon to his knees and shoots him in the head.

 

*

 

Mingjun stands for a while in the middle of Jiashuai’s kitchen, pinching the bridge of his nose, looking utterly exhausted at the mere idea of having to deal with the situation in front of him.

“Just so we’re clear,” he says, for the second time in seven minutes. “You’re eating sesame noodles with an American spy right now. In this apartment, that the Party pays for. In front of me.”

Jiashuai slurps down the remainder of his bowl before replying. “I feel like calling him a spy is an insult to my profession.”

Kevin looks affronted, but he doesn’t say anything.

“A CIA asset,” Mingjun rolls his eyes. “Since you’re being prissy.”

“I speak Chinese,” Kevin says finally. “Like, I understand what you’re saying.”

Mingjun glares at him. “Yes, I assumed you did.” He grabs a chair and sits on it in reverse, chest pressed to the backrest. “Jiashuai says you have info to sell. Let’s see what you’re worth, Cowboy.”

“I want safe passage to the Mainland for me and my mother,” Kevin says. “Before I—do, or say anything.”

“You’re lucky you’re alive,” Mingjun sneers. “You don’t get to make demands.”

“Things are tumultuous, back home,” Jiashuai amends. “There are no guarantees. Don’t you want to help your country anyway?”

Kevin chortles. “It’s not my country yet.”

“But it is,” Jiashuai insists. He can feel Mingjun’s eyes burning a hole in his shoulder. He ignores it. “As long as you are working in her interest. It _is_ your motherland.”

Mingjun huffs. “He’s not _my_ comrade, that’s for sure.”

Mingjun, he has reasons to mistrust, to remain closed like a clam, more than Jiashuai. Jiashuai is a good spy, but he was a better soldier. He knows war like an old mistress, the straightforwardness of firearms—you shoot me, I shoot you. Mingjun has always been a spy, never himself, always someone else. His Cantonese is flawless because he spent years speaking it in Taiwan, at the very center of the belly of the beast. Gut the KMT from the inside, that was the plan, then. Mingjun knows, how easy it is, to pretend. When he looks at Kevin he sees himself, maybe—he sees Mingjun ten years prior, spitting on the ground, _the fucking Reds, I’d kill them all if I could._ How easy it is to pretend.

“I want to be,” Kevin says. He sounds distressed, urgent. “I can’t go back. They know everything about me. I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to work for them.”

Mingjun’s gaze is piercing. “Convince me. No platitudes. Every fucking CIA tool has read Marx. You’ve always been so good at this, at this crap, _know your enemy.”_

Kevin gets up. Walks circles as he speaks, body taut with anger. “There’s a man, high up in the Agency, a doctor. An ex-doctor, really. He has an American name, and an almost-American accent. But sometimes when he talks, it seeps through. It’s the _Rs,_ the _Chs._ And he slips sometimes, uses the metric system. He knows things, he knows things that one could only possibly know, if—I’m not stupid. I counted, he was thirty-something in the forties. And once I realized, I started looking for them. German doctors. German engineers. German chemists. With brand new names and nice little families and tidy little houses and cushy government jobs.”

“They called it Operation Overcast,” Mingjun nods. “Then Paperclip. We have 537 names, but we know there are more. Twenty-one of them worked directly with Hitler.”

“I had a friend, in college,” Kevin says. His eyes are haunted. “His uncle smuggled him out of Austria just in time. Everyone else—his entire family, they all died in Dachau. This man, the doctor, I had to meet with him weekly. I had to look him in the eye and smile while knowing that he had been there. It wasn’t that hard, once I knew where to look, to find the names of the Nazi doctors assigned to each camp. The Agency has a very, very detailed list of—of the _experiments.”_ He pronounces that last word with a grimace, like spitting out bloody teeth. “We were roommates, for a while, you know? My Austrian friend from Cornell. Every Friday I would come back to the apartment and think—his parents. His older brother. I hope they were lucky enough to never meet that man’s _eyes.”_

He reminds Jiashuai of Junmyeon, in that very moment. Junmyeon who hated reminiscing, but around the fire at dusk with a bottle of soju his tongue would untie itself, sometimes. The Japanese had taken his father, his sister. Jiashuai had already guessed it was personal from the way Junmyeon held his dagger. From the way he said _I fight for the Fatherland, and I am not afraid to die._ Conviction born out of the deepest grief. Rage, rage brought to the shore by waves of indignation, the type of rage that transforms you, gives you purpose. The type of rage, Jiashuai still believes, that can turn into love.

“Okay,” Mingjun says, still cold, but Jiashuai knows him better than that. Something has shifted. “Tell me what you do for them, then.”

And Kevin does, explains patiently. Mingjun’s jaw unlocks slowly, as he listens. Spotting, first it was just spotting potential recruits. Then they wanted Kevin to make first contact, but he was too awkward for that. Too—something. Spooked people, his body sending mixed signals. Didn’t know how to flirt, either, his first handler had laughed, which did not help. They’d moved him then, to intel gathering. He was better at that. Then he’d gotten the job in Paris, and they had passed him a list of names. Jiashuai’s was at the very top. Kevin was just supposed to observe, and report back.

“But by then I already knew. I had already made up my mind. I haven’t told them anything substantial about Jiashuai in weeks.”

 _Jiashuai._ Familiar, first name basis. _How long?_ Jiashuai doesn’t ask. _What do you know about me?_

Mingjun shifts his weight to balls of his feet, the chair swinging gently. “Why did you accept in the first place?”

Kevin looks away. “I wanted to fight for freedom. I learned Russian to read Soviet literature, to understand. I thought, I don’t know. I thought I knew who the bad guys were. And I wanted to be a hero.”

 _I, too,_ Jiashuai thinks. _When I first learned how to shoot, when I joined the People’s Army. I, too, wanted to be a hero._

“Listen,” Kevin says, “I just want to take my mom away from all this, back to where she knows the language, to where she can finally rest. I just want to start over. You don’t have to trust me, because all I’m asking for, really, is the right to go back to the village I should have been born in and work in a farm, or something. What danger am I going to be, in the middle of nowhere, just minding my own damn business?”

The way he swears is funny. Like an old person. He learned Mandarin from his mother, no one else, Jiashuai realizes. Old slang, old words, the words of women.

Mingjun glances at him, sideways. They’ve worked together long enough to communicate like this, in silence. On some days it really does feel like Mingjun can read his mind.

 

“Your heart is still too soft,” Mingjun tells him on the balcony, under the pretense of smoking a cigarette. Jiashuai takes it from his fingers, inhales a long puff. The smoke comes out pretty in the Parisian air, a steady stream.

He leans against the balustrade, bites the inside of his mouth, thinking. “This job, don’t we do it exactly for this? For people like him?”

“He’s a goddamn traitor,” Mingjun hisses.

Jiashuai raises an eyebrow. “Who is he betraying, Jun? He was born in the West like we were born in China. He didn’t get to choose. We’ve forgiven worse. American soldiers, remember? We’ve allowed them to stay. This is our brother.”

Mingjun’s irises are fire, ablaze. “I’ve told you before. If it was up to me, all of them, they’d be six feet underground. _I_ have never forgiven anyone, and I don’t understand how _you_ can, after—”

Jiashuai stills. “Don’t.”

“Your heart is too soft,” Mingjun repeats, shaking his head. “But I’ll do this for you, because _you_ are my brother. He stays here. If he kills you in your sleep, I’ll find you in the afterlife and I will _laugh.”_

“I don’t sleep,” Jiashuai says, but he’s smiling.

It’s not really a lie, after all.

 

*

 

Jiashuai knows it’s a dream because Junmyeon is speaking French. He knows it’s a dream, and yet he reaches for him, screams when his fingers close onto thin air. He knows it’s a dream, but when Junmyeon starts bleeding from the back of his skull, rivulets of red, Jiashuai tries to stop it anyway, hands pressing into emptiness, desperate.

 _Too soft, too soft,_ the wind murmurs. _And never quick enough._

 

*

 

Kevin is standing above him, pale in the moonlight, hands not quite touching, but close. Like he grabbed for Jiashuai and then remembered he was not allowed.

“You were shouting,” he explains. “You were shouting in your sleep. You sounded like—I thought you were in pain.”

 _I was,_ Jiashuai doesn’t answer. That would be melodramatic, and he’s not one for melodrama.

“I have nightmares. I forgot—it’s been a while since I’ve had someone over. I forgot to warn you.”

“It’s okay,” Kevin shrugs. “I just thought you were dying, or something. It really sounded—”

“I’m fine,” Jiashuai interrupts him. “Go back to sleep.”

 

In the morning he’s the one to wake up a disoriented Kevin. He’s too tall for Jiashuai’s sofa, rubs the back of his neck frowning once he sits up, his discomfort obvious, but he says nothing. Jiashuai makes them rice and soup and they eat in silence.

“I knew you’d help me,” Kevin says, breaking the quiet. “I didn’t know how to talk to you, how to break the ice, but I was sure you’d help.”

“That’s quite the bargain to make on an instinct,” Jiashuai says quietly, eyes trained on Kevin’s chopsticks. Pretty, red lips. He forces himself to look away.

“That’s one thing I did take from the Agency. Gut feelings, they’re usually right. But it was the way you talked to children. Even in Moscow, where you could barely speak the language.”

Jiashuai pushes himself off his chair, grabs their now empty bowls and utensils and puts them in his small kitchen sink. “How do I talk to children?”

“You squat to be at eye-level. You make your voice softer. You tilt your head to the side, just like that, mirroring,” Kevin demonstrates. “I don’t think you even realize.”

“Of course I realize,” Jiashuai snorts, “That’s my job. Body language, putting people at ease. I _got_ you.”

The left corner of Kevin’s mouth lifts. “You didn’t know anyone was watching. And I’m good at—observing. I’m good at reading people.”

“I don’t like being read,” Jiashuai says.

“I did watch you for a long time, you know,” Kevin says. “You’re lonely.”

Jiashuai’s grip tightens on the faux-marble counter, knuckles whitening. “You don’t know me,” he hisses, icy. “And I said I don’t _like_ being read.”

The doorbell unfreezes the atmosphere. Jiashuai is thankful, thankful even more when it’s Mingjun on his doorstep.

“I haven’t slept all fucking night,” Mingjun grits out in lieu of _bonjour._ “It’s your fault,” he points an accusatory finger at Kevin. “I’m doing this for him,” he says, a motion of the chin in Jiashuai’s direction. “He sees something in you, Heaven protect us.”

 

*

 

At war, bonds are formed fast, and dipped in iron. Men learn to love, at war. In blood, in terror, men learn sacrifice and devotion. When you lie down in the mud together, when you clean pus out of shrapnel wounds, when you share everything from the way you snore to the way you cry out for your mother in your sleep, _brother_ and _lover_ and every word in between, they start carrying a new weight.

And maybe the war is never quite over, and that is why Jiashuai cannot connect with anyone but other soldiers—cannot wait for civilians when tomorrow could be his last day, cannot take things _slow,_ cannot take his time.

Women, they like to be courted, they like to be _wooed._ French women, they find him exotic, they like to touch, they like to _pet,_ they like to admire with eyes and fingertip alike. In ballrooms, in restaurants, Jiashuai feels their gazes on him like question marks, branded.

Men here, Jiashuai is too hard for them, too sad. He doesn’t like their art and he doesn’t like their music and he certainly does not like what they expect of him. He tried, once, twice. But men his age, here, they carry demons of a different kind. There is no meeting point for the trajectories of their griefs.

It does not matter anyway. Jiashuai has a job to do.

_Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy._

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, until it finally rings true.

 

*

 

It takes a week and a half just for Mingjun to _talk_ to someone. It helps that Kevin is _technically_ Chinese, but barely. What helps more is the list Kevin gives them. Names, addresses. American contacts under false identities, carrying European passports. The most notable is a double agent blindsiding the Soviets. Kevin does not like the fact Mingjun greedily pockets the info, with clearly no intent to pass it on to the Russians.

“There are many sides to this war,” Mingjun shrugs. “I know which one I’m on. Alliances can shift any _second.”_

“But the Union—”

“First lesson,” Mingjun interrupts. “Where does your loyalty lie?”

“World Communism,” Kevin answers, honest.

“Wrong,” Mingjun sighs.

 _“Right,”_ Jiashuai interjects. “But incomplete. Our comrades in Russia have been lead astray. To be on the side of the people is to be on the side of the Chairman.”

“So you’re willing to objectively benefit Washington to what? Play the Soviets?”

Mingjun fixes him with cat-like eyes. “Maybe. It’s all an equation, right. It doesn’t matter how you get to the final result as long as you can justify it.”

“That’s not what—” Kevin starts, distressed.

“Forget the books, Cowboy,” Mingjun cuts him. “I learned my tricks the hard way. This is how you win the war.”

“To get rid of the gun,” Jiashuai recites, “It is necessary to take up the gun. Even in the books, Kevin. _We_ don’t lie. It’s written black on white. Whatever it takes. Sometimes what it takes is not pretty.”

And Kevin looks at him, looks at _him_ with intensity, like he’s still trying to figure Jiashuai out, when Jiashuai expressly told him to stop.

“Look at it this way,” Mingjun tries. “This is our ticket. That name, I’m going to use it as currency, to get you a red passport and two one-way tickets to Shanghai. What the people I give it to do with it, now, that’s their business.”

When he’s nervous, Kevin bites the inside of his cheek. Jiashuai wonders what’s grounding him. The taste of metal? The stab of pain?

“God,” he exhales, head between his hands. They’re big hands, Jiashuai notes, almost absently. But soft, uncalloused, the hands of an academic. “God, whatever the _fuck,”_ that last part in English. “Whatever, Jesus, just get me out of the country.”

 

*

 

They cannot be seen together outside. Now that he knows he’s been made, Jiashuai knows he will be moved soon anyway, but it would be stupid if they got into all that trouble just for Kevin to be dropped into the Seine by one of his own at the last minute.

So Kevin goes back to his own place, returns to his own habits. Inconspicuous, quiet. Jiashuai can’t stop himself, not when this job has ingrained surveillance in him like a second nature. He finds a spot and watches him, just like Kevin had watched Jiashuai, before. Learns him the way he himself refuses to be learned. What Kevin buys at the local market, how he likes his coffee, how he smiles at clients when he hands them back their translated dossiers, what time he wakes up, and what time he sleeps.

“You get obsessive,” Mingjun remarks.

“I’m invested, it’s different. We put in effort.”

 _“I_ put in effort,” Mingjun rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t really mean it.

Jiashuai draws meaningless lines with his dip pen on a napkin. “I’ve seen you more in the past month that in the last _six._ So there’s that, at least.”

“Aw,” Mingjun smirks. His irises sparkle with true affection, rare. Not for the first time, Jiashuai wishes he could fall in love with him. In theory, they share everything there is to share.

Maybe he lost that part of himself in the Korean mountains. He worries, sometimes. He worries about that.

 

*

 

Mrs Li flies in on a Friday afternoon from Montreal, Quebec. Before that, instructed by her son in a very sober letter, she took the train, and then the bus, all the way across Canada. Kevin waits for her at Charles De Gaulle with a bouquet of yellow and orange flowers, hugs her so tight her feet lift off the ground. Her delighted giggles ring through the arrivals hall, music, light. Jiashuai knows all this because he’s standing in the shadows, until the very moment Mrs Li and her son step into a taxi.

They take the train to Moscow ten days later, and tell border control they are there for a vacation. Kevin smiles, leans in conspiratorially, _my mom is visiting, you know. She’s never been to Eastern Europe before._ There they slip discreetly into another train, and ride along the Trans-siberian railway all the way to Vladivostok.

Vladivostok is where Jiashuai lets him go. On the other side of the Urals, home is closest it’s been in years, and so, so far away.

 

*

 

There is a Xinhua branch in West Berlin. Jiashuai’s German is shaky at best, but he’ll pick it up easily enough, he supposes, like he did with French. Mingjun’s cover still stands, and the MSS sees no reason to uproot him, so Jiashuai travels to Germany alone. His new handler is a European who speaks Mandarin like a native but insists on talking to Jiashuai in German for _practice._ Jiashuai dislikes him on sight.

Mingjun visits him eight months later. He spent the summer in Marseille, and his skin is glowing, honey-like. In contrast Jiashuai looks like a tired ghost one haunting away from evaporation.

“Have you not slept at all since you left?” Mingjun asks, half mocking half serious, poking at the bags under Jiashuai’s eyes. “These look like bruises.”

“I sleep enough,” Jiashuai says. Not quite a lie, again. Sometimes it feels like he will never be fully true again. This, too, he has given to the Motherland, sacrificed it at her altar.

When Mingjun leaves Jiashuai drives to Checkpoint Charlie, and seriously considers driving into the wall. He has thought similar thoughts before, but this one scares him in its intensity. There is a gym a block down from his house that he frequents sometimes. At this hour it isn't open, but it’s nothing a bobby pin can’t fix.

His knuckles hurt afterwards, when he’s pummeled the punching bag for hours, but it’s the kind of ache that throbs like a heartbeat, pulsating, _alive._

 

*

 

He dreams of Kevin now, too. Of snapping his neck that day in the seventh district, never getting to hear his side of the story.

Of meeting him elsewhere, in Incheon, in New York, on another planet.

 

*

 

Mingjun retires first. 37, it’s young for anyone but them. 37, it’s two lifetimes and a half. Three hot wars and a long, cold one, eternal winter.

He sends a letter, from Aix-En-Provence. When Jiashuai gets the envelope, Mingjun is already in Beijing. There’s an office job waiting for him, too, Mingjun writes in code. He’s done enough. He can come home.

But like Odysseus, Jiashuai is lost. Weary traveller, lonesome seaman, he does not know how to sing the hero’s return.

He left in ‘53, with the first batch of volunteers sent to Korea. It’s 1967. He’s seen postcards, pastel pictures of Changsha. It looks like a different _country._ Not that he’d return there anyway, not when there’s no one waiting. The family house, he knows, was taken by the Government when Jiashuai’s father passed. He hopes a family lives in it now. With children, loud, happy.

He writes back, in Pinyin and cypher, and in strophes.

_The road I’ve taken_

_It does not lead back to where the journey began_

 

*

 

He’s on the phone, the receiver stuck between his cheek and his shoulder, one hand busy flipping through pages so that he can dictate a few figures to his editor, the other scribbling nonsense onto a discarded piece of paper. It helps him focus, doodling. He’s always doing it.

When he hangs up he realizes, looking down at his desk, that the lazy lines he has been tracing are the slope of Kevin’s nose, the imprint of his shoulder against the Paris skyline, a distant memory from those three nights he spent in Jiashuai’s living room, indelible image.

 

*

 

The Xinhua News Agency offices in West Berlin close definitely in December 1968.

Jiashuai receives his orders a few weeks before that, inescapable, with a pre-booked itinerary that takes the long, scenic way to Beijing.

He gets a letter from Mingjun, unofficial, a few days later.

The only words on the paper are _Yunfu, Guangdong Province._

 

*

 

Jiashuai keeps the paper folded in eight in the breast pocket of his suit when he takes the boat, leaving the European continent behind him. Every time he changes vests, he moves the paper to his new one.

He thought about pretending not to understand, feeding his own self lies until they start tasting like a convincing truth, but he can’t throw the paper away. It’s been folded and unfolded so many times now the perpendicular lines are becoming permanent.

It’s a long journey to Asia. Jiashuai spends most of it writing. Journalism, that was a cover, but his affinity for words is not. His poetry has been affected by the way westerners speak. He considered cleansing the language, but rereading his work, it has never been more genuine than it is right at this second.

It’s representative. This is who he has become. His ink like arrows on a map, retracing his steps, _telling._

 

*

 

They award him another medal in Beijing. Mingjun cries when they pin it to his lapel, the way Jiashuai imagines his mother would. Afterwards he takes Jiashuai out for food in the city, insists on paying, almost bites Jiashuai’s hand when he tries reaching for the bill.

“I thought you’d be gone by now,” he admits, lips stained red by the wine they shared. “You’ve never been one for desks and reports.”

Jiashuai looks away, searching for the horizon line. There are so many buildings. There were not so many buildings when he left. “I don’t know how to go places by myself anymore. I don’t know how to be someone who doesn’t follow orders.”

Mingjun smiles at him. It’s a gentle, brotherly smile. He puts a large manilla envelope on the table.

“This is an order, then.”

Inside Jiashuai finds one train ticket to Guangzhou, a few thousand Yuan, and a folded map. On it there is a long red line, drawn in marker, starting at the train station, and ending in Yunfu.

 

*

 

He has time to think about it, in the train. It rocks like a ship at sea, rhythmically, no storm. Jiashuai likes the sounds the wheels make as they glide against the rails.

He thinks about it. His mind goes to Byungjun first. Jiashuai had wanted men, before Byungjun, but he had never touched one. That night, he hadn’t understood yet, the scope of things. How it would leave him hungry, how it would leave him _starved._

War has made him superstitious. He believes, when he indulged in theories, that fate sent him Byungjun before Junmyeon, so that _one_ of them would be ready. If he hadn’t learned with Byungjun first, all easy smiles and soft skin, he thinks, maybe, he never would have kissed Junmyeon under that barren cherry tree in Haeju. If he hadn't learned with Byungjun first, he wouldn’t have known what to do, his hands shaking, his mouth reverent, Junmyeon’s body a foreign country to conquer.

He thinks about it. How the first time he had spotted Kevin it had been with _hunger._ How it had been easy to recognize him, over and over again, because Jiashuai liked looking at him. The fleeting seconds where their bodies had been pressed together, how Kevin had felt under Jiashuai’s hands, Jiashuai holding him down. And the weeks of _watching,_ the weeks of _keeping safe._ And the fire, the light in him, intertwined with despair but still bright like a lighthouse, flashing in the night for Jiashuai to see.

He thinks about it.

 

*

 

There is a small paper factory in Yunfu, where most of the men work. Jiashuai goes there first, suitcase still in hand. When he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, he goes to the public canteen. One of the workers there points him to the row of houses at the bottom of the hill.

It’s Mrs Li who opens the door when he knocks. Jiashuai takes off his hat and bows. He wore his dress uniform, both because he thought it would give him some sort of legitimacy if he had to ask around more than expected, and because it still is what he feels the most comfortable in. This old woman, though, looks at him with curiosity and maybe a drop of pity. He wonders if it would be the same if he had come as a civilian.

 _I’m a friend of your son’s,_ he tells her.

 _My boy doesn’t hang around soldiers,_ she replies, but she invites him inside anyway, offers him tea and stuffed rice balls.

Kevin’s voice is as deep as Jiashuai remembers. “Mama, I’m home,” sunny and aerial. He stills, hand against the door frame, when he sees Jiashuai at the kitchen table.

“Hello, Kevin,” Jiashuai says softly.

“It’s Yanchen, now,” Kevin says, hoarse like there’s something in his throat. “Mama, this is Captain Yong.”

“It’s Lieutenant colonel, actually,” Jiashuai corrects him, and he finds his voice suddenly sounds similar, sandpaper on wood.

Mrs Li turns bright red. “Oh, you are—you saved my boy. You brought us here.” She waves a drying rag around, agitated. “He didn’t tell me! I don’t have anything ready.”

“Mama,” Kevin laughs tenderly, “I’ll go pick up pastries in town.”

“Mrs Li, please,” Jiashuai tries, blushing in turn. “I’m not—I just wanted to—I needed to see for myself. I won’t be here long.”

“See what?” Kevin asks. “That you didn’t make a mistake?” It looks like he wants to say more, words fighting to get out, but he’s restraining himself for his mother’s sake.

Jiashuai shakes his head. “That you’re doing well, here. That _you_ didn’t make a mistake, I suppose.”

“Come outside,” Kevin says. “Let’s talk outside.”

It’s a strange role reversal. This is Kevin’s territory. Last time they were one on one the surrounding were Jiashuai’s, familiar, _known._

“You did save me,” is the first thing Kevin tells him, in the breeze. “I never got to thank you for that.”

“I didn’t come to collect,” Jiashuai says, not quite daring to look him in the eye. He doesn’t know why he came. On a hunch? Following a red thread only he can see? Because there is a fire in him, simmering, unextinguished?

“It would be fine if you did,” Kevin says. “I _am_ indebted to you.”

“I really just wanted to see how you were doing.”

Kevin’s eyes turn into half crescents when he smiles, tiny moons. “It’s a good life. My mother is happy. No one is making me work for Nazis. You know.”

“I know,” Jiashuai nods.

“You should stay for dinner.”

He doesn’t have anywhere else to go, anyway. He doesn’t tell Kevin that.

Instead, he asks, “Do you want me to call you Yanchen?”

“No. I don’t know. It’s my name, here. But it’s also… My mom gave me a Chinese name, at birth, and it’s not Yanchen. And you, you know me as Kevin. I’m Kevin, I think, more than I am Yanchen, or Jiaheng, or Chris. And no one has called me Kevin in a long time.”

The earth is yellowish, here, almost burned. Kevin looks impossibly tall under the dying sun.

“Kevin,” Jiashuai says, breathes. And in return, hesitant, two syllables, he gets, “Jiashuai.”

 

*

 

Mrs Li shoos him out of the kitchen when he tries to offer his help. _She’s always like that,_ Kevin chuckles.

And it’s the first time Jiashuai hears him laugh like that, carefree and loving. He grins, later, at the dinner table, smile eating half his face, and that too, is a first. Jiashuai can’t look away, mesmerized.

After dessert, he bows again, thanks Mrs Li for the meal profusely. The corners of his eyes sting. Mingjun is an orphan too, and he’s Jiashuai’s only friend. Dinners like that, they’re just not—they’re just not a part of his life.

“We have a guest room,” Kevin says, tentative. “It’s dark outside. There is a hostel, too, but really. I mean. You should stay.”

“He’s staying,” Mrs Li says before Jiashuai can open his mouth. And what can he answer to that except _Yes, Auntie?_ So Kevin shows him the room, gives him a clean pillow, a cooling mat and a pair of fresh sheets. Jiashuai feels the strange drive to prove himself, tells him _I could have slept on the floor._ Kevin just raises both eyebrows, stays silent for a while.

“Well,” he says finally, very quietly, “You don’t have to.”

 

*

 

And it’s just that, the road back to Beijing, it’s long, it’s _days._

 

*

 

“You were screaming again,” Kevin whispers, hand fisted in Jiashuai’s sweat-soaked tunic.

“I’m sorry,” Jiashuai hiccups, hiding his face in his open palms. “Is your mother—?”

“She could sleep through an earthquake. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“It’s the same dreams,” Jiashuai tries to pull away. Kevin holds on.

“Scoot,” he orders. Jiashuai does so reflexively, but then he stares, brows furrowed.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to try something. Just make some space.”

This bed was not built for two, and Kevin is tall. To fit they have to melt into each other, puzzle pieces. Jiashuai has shared beds before. He expects stiffness, but Kevin’s body is relaxed against his.

“Sleep, now,” Kevin tells him.

Jiashuai does. He doesn’t wake up until morning.

 

*

 

And it’s just that, when Mrs Li herself begs him to stay some more, Jiashuai doesn’t know how to refuse her weary eyes. He has vacation days to use, after all. He hasn’t taken a leave in so long.

No excuse, he has no excuse.

 

*

 

Kevin works in a fish shop, four days a week. Three days a week, he teaches English at the local elementary school. His arms, his shoulders have filled in since the last time Jiashuai saw him. From carrying heavy crates around all day, from being the man of the house, too.

One morning Jiashuai comes down early and finds him cutting wood in the courtyard, shirtless, sweat glistening down chiseled muscle.

Jiashuai watches him, shameless, shameful. Watches him, not unlike all those years ago, but this time without a lie to tell himself.

Thinks, _ah, the dragon never sleeps._

 

*

 

He still calls for Junmyeon in his sleep. Kevin tells him so. Kevin knows because it is a ritual now, their two mattresses on the floor, their backs barely grazing as night falls—and then limbs interlinked in the morning, their bodies magnets.

But he does not wake up haggard anymore. He wakes with his nose pressed to Kevin’s nape and his breathing even.

 

*

 

“Local elections are coming up,” Mrs Li tells them over breakfast, tapping the newspaper in her hands with her folded pair of glasses. “I’ve told this one so many times, he should run for City Council.”

“Mama,” Kevin says softly, with the indulgence of someone who’s repeated this particular argument many, many times, “I said, I like the quiet. I don’t want people to know my name.”

“Jiashuai, then,” Mrs Li says, like it’s the natural conclusion, the logical next step.

“I don’t live here,” Jiashuai says, incredulous. “I—I’m going to leave. Soon.”

Mrs Li scrunches up her nose. “Are you?”

“Of course I am,” Jiashuai says, but his protest sounds hollow even to his own ears. “My whole life is—” he stumbles on the following words like a kid running to fast and meeting a branch. _Back in Beijing._

But there’s nothing in Beijing. A small, tidy apartment filled with books and medals. And an office with his name on the bronze plate, sure. And—Mingjun, of course, but Mingjun can jump into a train pretty much anytime. Mingjun isn’t in Beijing, _per se._ Isn’t a tree. Can be moved. And Mingjun, Mingjun _sent him_ here—

“Jiashuai,” Kevin’s voice brings him back to the surface. It doesn’t carry its usual melody; it’s urgent, _anxious._ Jiashuai hasn’t heard him this anxious since Paris. “Jiashuai, can you hear me? Come back to us.”

“I’m here,” he croaks.

Kevin is kneeling next to his chair, his large hands on Jiashuai’s thighs. Jiashuai is pretty sure the right one was cupping his cheek a mere second ago. He wants it back. He misses the warmth.

“You went white,” Kevin says, upset. “So pale, so suddenly. And your eyes glazed over. My mother thought you were possessed.”

“Maybe I was,” Jiashuai laughs weakly.

Kevin glares at him. “You fucking scared me.”

And sitting at this table, in this man’s house, with this man’s mother, this is not what he was supposed to make of himself. There was a future for him, a career, a flower path. There was a future, Jiashuai paid for it in blood.

He doesn’t want to go back to it. He’d rather stay here. He’d rather work at the paper factory. Or maybe just collect his military pension, and if it’s not enough so be it. Maybe if he stops ingesting food his stomach will eat itself, and then the rest of him.

“Jiashuai,” Kevin repeats, and he sounds seriously concerned now. His hand finds its way back to Jiashuai’s face, holding, cradling.

It’s not soft anymore. It’s the hand of a worker.

 

*

 

They walk along the Nanshan river. It rained in the morning, and the water is green, and the air smells like wet forest. Jiashuai’s hair is getting too long, unfit for Army regulation, caressing the back of his neck with every gust.

Kevin talks in hushed whispers, fast, in words that should be written down. They are not pretty words, but they hold meaning, like a pregnant mother’s round belly.

There is still untamed rage in him, Jiashuai realizes. Rage that Jiashuai set down like a backpack years ago, somewhere along the Yalu river.

Kevin knows the world is ugly because he has read about it, because someone showed him the underworld, showed him where secrets are born and how they are kept, wanted to make him one of those secrets.

But Kevin also knows the world is ugly because his mother came to North-America and was promised freedom and milk and honey and earned misery and wrinkled hands instead. Also knows the world is ugly because there is no piece of it left untouched by human greed, no parcel untarnished by stupid, avoidable, _human_ mistakes. Not even here. Not even home.

Jiashuai, on the other hand, knows two things:

One: that the world isn’t only ugly—that it is terrible, that it is terrifying in ways that cannot be put into words. In ways haunting, in ways that grab inside him like a long-nailed hand, and steal the sleep from his open, gasping lips.

Two: that the world is beautiful, that solidarity still triumphs; and how it feels to be in love.

 

*

 

And love does not bring the dead back. Jiashuai already learned his lesson. But Kevin hums under his breath at dawn as he puts on his work clothes. He tugs his hair behind his ear when he’s trying to focus on his reading. He takes his mother for a walk every afternoon, down the road, where the stones are white and the trees curve like an arch, providing shadow, shelter from sun and rain alike.

And love does not bring the dead back, but Jiashuai drinks in every sight, every murmur, with the desperation of a man drowning.

“You know,” Kevin says one evening, meat sizzling in the pan, “You gave me this life.”

“You made it for yourself,” Jiashuai shakes his head.

He doesn’t see Junmyeon at all, when he looks at Kevin. Even in their similitudes, they are so distinct, so incompatible they might as well be different species.

He doesn’t see Junmyeon in Kevin’s optimism and he doesn’t see Junmyeon in Kevin’s sadness and he doesn’t see Junmyeon in Kevin’s deep brown irises when he’s looking at Jiashuai—really looking at him, which he does more and more lately, when he thinks Jiashuai himself isn’t looking. But Jiashuai almost always is.

He very much still sees Junmyeon in his sleep, but that, Jiashuai is quite sure, will never change.

 

*

 

It’s a quiet affair, his transfer. He travels back to Beijing to put in the request personally. When he clears his desk all he has fits into a tiny cardboard box. Notebooks, mainly, and pens, and a watch.

The police station in Yunfu is barely the size of a floor in the building Jiashuai used to work. The office they give him is also way smaller than the one he left behind, but Jiashuai likes it. Emptiness, negative space, they have jaws like sea monsters, always ready to swallow you down.

He has a department-issued gun and a department-issued apartment and a department-issued car. Kevin is his first and only visitor, shifting nervously on his feet at Jiashuai’s brand new doorstep, food carefully prepared by Mrs Li in a big glass container. There is a small round table in the living room, flower-patterned tablecloth, that Jiashuai has not sat at yet. They eat in companionable silence, eyes trained on each other. Kevin’s tongue pokes out to collect a drop of sauce at the corner of his mouth and Jiashuai’s stomach twists, typhoon-like. And this is the anatomy of his desire—violent, sudden, always like fighting a battle.

Subterranean, slow, always like infiltration, because Jiashuai was a soldier, but Jiashuai was also a spy.

 

*

 

Over an empty carafe of mulled wine, in Berlin, Mingjun had learned in conspiratorially, and told Jiashuai about a girl he had left behind in Macau. How putting his hands on her body had been harder than digging himself out of the dirt, how her lips were sticky with chapstick and her fingers danced down his abdomen, testing, asking. She had been porcelain in his arms. White, thin, expensive and breakable, beautiful. Not the kind of girl one marries, certainly not the kind of girl one brings home.

And drunk, and tired, Jiashuai had murmured, more to the wind than to his best friend, _I’m never bringing a girl home,_ words like bullets cutting through the sky, just as lethal, just as dangerous.

Mingjun had just raised his glass, mocking salute to any higher power. Had knocked their shoulders together, had fallen asleep right against Jiashuai’s side later, same as before, trusting.

Jiashuai goes back to that night often, to the heat of Mingjun’s body through his clothes, to this wordless admission.

 

*

 

Bougainvillea spilling over balconies, flocks of larks flying overhead, Springtime comes in the blink of an eye.

“You’ve been here almost a year,” Kevin notes, flipping through the stack of papers he has to grade. He’s still wearing his teacher clothes, ironed button down, his nicest pair of brown slacks. His hair is combed to the side, just like it was in Paris.

“The girls in town,” Kevin continues, “They gossip. They come in pairs at the shop, you know? Everyone’s wondering who you’ll end up picking.”

From his spot on the sofa, Jiashuai raises his eyes from the book he’s reading.

“Picking?”

“When you finally marry,” Kevin explains.

Jiashuai lets out a huff. “I’m not going to get married. I’m way more than trouble than it’s worth. Besides,” he pushes his reading glasses up his nose, “Shouldn’t _you_ be the talk of the town? You’re handsome and tall and you live with your mother.”

“Don’t,” Kevin blushes. His entire face is flushed. It’s terribly endearing. “I feel like I’ve missed the mark anyway.”

“We’re not that old,” Jiashuai frowns.

Kevin sets his pen down. “But everyone has children. And even those who remarry—I don’t know. I don’t know how to talk to women, and I don’t have enough to offer for mama to _arrange_ anything, and I—I’m not even sure I want to.”

“Okay,” Jiashuai says. Kevin is still pink.

“I used to dream about having kids. I’d marry a nice Chinese girl, in Vancouver, and we’d have five of them. I worked so hard for it. You know how many Universities wouldn’t even look at my file?”

“What did you want to be?”

They almost never talk about their lives in the West. Most of the time the memories look more like film, like stories that happened to other people, in another era of human history.

“A writer, first,” Kevin says, wistful. “Then a professor. I mean, I realized real fast it wasn’t going to happen, no one in America was ready to listen to an Asian man talk about Plato. But it was a nice dream. I give excerpts to the kids here, you know? English translations from the _Symposium._ They like it.”

“I wanted to be a poet,” Jiashuai offers in exchange. “Before the war, and even during. But then I couldn’t write about anything _but_ war, and not—not in the way that the Party wants. And I understand why, I do—”

“Jiashuai,” Kevin interrupts him, “Not here.”

Jiashuai scrunches his nose. “What?”

“You don’t have to pretend _here._ You can just say what you believe.”

This kindness, Jiashuai wants to bury himself in it. It would be enough if he could just surround himself with Kevin’s understanding, he thinks. There is no one else here who knows what the Siberian landscape looks like at full speed, from a train window. It would be enough.

“I do understand,” he insists. “But I cannot do it. I just cannot. I know what I was fighting for, I raised the flag proudly. It just never really feels like victory to me. When I put ink on paper, all that comes out is this ache. And I believe in love. I believe in revolution. But I only have words for death.”

Kevin stares at him for several heartbeats. If they had met in the mountains, Jiashuai thinks, telling him would be easier. With all this life in front of him, he’s terrified of ruining the only shelter he has left.

It’s not an urgency anyway. It’s just that when Kevin devours him with his gaze like that, Jiashuai’s breath hitches at the back of his throat, and his mind starts racing.

Mrs Li knocks gently on the door of her son’s study, pokes her head inside.

“Jiashuai, dear, are you staying for dinner?”

It’s a rhetorical question. They both know the table is already set for three.

“Yes, Auntie,” Jiashuai smiles all the same.

 

*

 

The first weekend of April, the weather is clement enough that they decide to go hiking. Kevin has an old camera hung over his shoulder, wastes precious film on shaky portraits of Jiashuai standing in front of the most random things. A tiny stream of ice-cold water erupting from rock, an orange tree, an abandoned statue of Buddha, and so on, and so on. Kevin’s laughter rings different in the stillness of nature, younger. Not for the first time, Jiashuai imagines him in green army fatigues.

They sit cross-legged in a small clearing, lotus position. Jiashuai packed sandwiches, western-style, and a thermos of juice.

“If I ask you a question,” Kevin starts, tentative, “A question you won’t like, will you answer anyway?”

Jiashuai throws a pebble into the horizon, skipping stones with no lake. It ricochets against a tree.

“Depends.”

“It’s about before,” Kevin says quietly.

“Depends,” Jiashuai repeats. “I’m not telling you how many people I’ve killed.”

“I don’t want to know how many people you’ve killed.”

 _You should,_ Jiashuai thinks. _I’m not going to tell you, but you should care. You shouldn’t trust me blindly._

“The man in your dreams,” Kevin continues. “The man that haunts you. Is it because you couldn’t save him?”

A wave of ice hits Jiashuai down to his _bones,_ a blade digging deep.

It comes out strangled, when he replies, “Yes.”

Kevin doesn’t seem to be able to look in his direction. Jiashuai is fine with that. He doesn’t think he could take the intensity of his brown irises.

“Did you love him?”

“Yes,” Jiashuai answers again, on autopilot, watching himself from afar.

“Were you in love with him?”

He’s not certain of how it happens. Kevin moves first, crawls to him.

“Yes,” Jiashuai sobs, face buried in the crook of Kevin’s neck, voicing it for the very first time.

 

*

 

 _His name was Kim Junmyeon,_ Jiashuai recalls very softly, eyes fixed to the stars above, a cosmic ceiling. On his right, Kevin is so still Jiashuai is tempted to check if he’s still breathing. _He liked traditional Korean theater, and he spoke my language, and with him I forgot I was terrified._

 

*

 

It’s a trade. Kevin tells him about roommates that were not roommates. Kevin tells him about bars in New York City. Kevin tells him about having to bite down on his pillow because the walls were thin, in his ratty apartment, and the neighbors always ready to report anyone that didn’t quite fit in right to the HUAC.

In the darkness, when Kevin reaches for his hand, Jiashuai shuts his eyes and inhales shakily. There are no witnesses in the mountains, apart from old spirits, and the ghosts one carries everywhere.

 _Junmyeon,_ Jiashuai prays silently, _Mama, Baba, I’m sorry._

 

*

 

He wonders if Mrs Li knows. If she is willingly blind. How many times, before Jiashuai realized it himself, she found them entangled in the morning, Kevin’s hands gripping Jiashuai’s sleep shirt, Jiashuai’s nose pressed to Kevin’s collarbone.

He wonders if Mrs Li cries for the grandchildren she will not have, the evening Kevin kisses her on the cheek, an overnight bag in one hand.

It’s Mrs Li’s maternal grin, the weight of her hand on the crown of Jiashuai’s head, that makes him hesitate at the door. But he is hungry, he is starved, and Kevin is standing there, waiting for Jiashuai to step aside. He smells like the expensive soap Jiashuai got him for Christmas, the one for special occasions, for when he’s tired enough for a long warm bath.

“Aren’t you going to let me in?”

“You need to be sure,” Jiashuai says, still thinking of Mrs Li. “I need you to be sure.”

But he flattens himself against the wall anyway, not waiting for an answer. Kevin slams the door shut, drops his bag in the hallway.

“I’ve been here before, Shuai,” he whispers. Jiashuai is still wearing his police uniform. He still smells like city and smoke and work. The contrast is dizzying. He wants to lick a stripe up Kevin’s cheek, try, see if he tastes like rosewater.

He has wanted for so, so long.

“Before,” he says, barely recognizing his own voice, “It didn’t matter.”

At the back of his mind, delirious, he thinks maybe he should carry Kevin over the threshold of his bedroom.

Kevin goes to shut the blinds.

“There. No one looking in. Just you and me.”

“Kevin,” Jiashuai says in French, because it’s easier, even if he’s rusty. “I don’t remember how. I don’t trust my own hands.”

“It’s okay,” Kevin smiles, gentle, slow, in their native tongue. “I don’t remember either. We’ll invent it if we have to.”

 

*

 

 _Yanchen,_ Jiashuai gasps. _Yanchen,_ Jiashuai pants.

Bodies arching, meeting, love laid out on clean white sheets, love different than the one on a cot, in a tent—love the same.

_Yanchen, Yanchen, Yanchen._

  
  
*

 

_“The past is the past._

_To see real heroes, look around you.”_

\- Mao Zedong


End file.
